The New Yorker's Anthony Lane calmly and accurately puts the boots to Thomas Harris' terrible Hannibal Rising. Harris has written two great genre novels -- Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, which are models of concise, economical prose. Hannibal Rising is a lesser, intensely overwritten book, as preening and full of itself as its protagonist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, MD, is of himself. Lane has some good insights about the benefits of working inside a genre form, and scores bonus points by name-checking George V. Higgins' superb The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Anthony Lane:

"With Hannibal Rising, we watch the legend sink.

Why did Harris pursue this line of inquiry? He has written one great Lecter book, The Silence of the Lambs, and two lesser ones, so why produce a fourth that is not merely the weakest but that makes you wonder if the others were so gripping after all? There is a puff of grand delusion here, of the sort to which all thriller-writers are susceptible. Compare The Friends of Eddie Coyle, an early novel by George V. Higgins, with the bulky solemnities of his later work; or, for that matter, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with more recent le Carré like The Night Manager or The Constant Gardener. At some point, each man started to hear that he was so much more than the master of a genre (as if that were an ignoble thing to be), and responded to such flattery by expanding his fiction beyond its confines, not realizing that what he felt as a restriction was in fact its natural shape. That is how a writer loses thrust and form, and how Thomas Harris went from this, a jailbreak in The Silence of the Lambs:

'Lieutenant, it looks like he’s got two six-shot .38s. We heard three rounds fired and the dump pouches on the gunbelts are still full, so he may just have nine left. Advise SWAT it’s +Ps jacketed hollowpoints. This guy favors the face.'

To this, a love duet from Hannibal Rising:

'I see you and the cricket sings in concert with my heart.'

'My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing.'

What the hell is going on here? Where is the damn SWAT team when you need it? And will somebody tell me how the guy who favored the face—the adult Lecter, armed and on the loose—emerged from the schoolboy with the hopping heart, trading insect quips with Lady Murasaki? They are lifted by moonlight, apparently, 'to a place above ghost-ridden earth, a place unhaunted, and being there together was enough.' Ahhh. We would call that moribund, the swollen style. Harris has developed aspirations to be a prose poet, not remembering that the jailbreak, with its brace of .38s, was already poetry in motion—hard, metallic, and perfectly timed."

- posted by cjb @ 7:28 PM